Demystifying Keyword Driven Using WATIR

Demystifying Keyword Driven Using WATIR

Inspiration:
While working for growing organization where QA budget is limited and cannot afford to spend thousand of dollars on commercial tool like WinRunner/QTP, a need was felt within QA team to use automated functional tool.

WATIR (Web Application Testing In Ruby) was selected as freeware tool for POC.
WATIR can be downloaded from http://watir.com/installation/

Baby Steps:
 After downloading WATIR, QA team started reading through the documentation and quickly realized that it is extremely user friendly and does not take much time to write first functional automated test.
Soon we started creating automation test cases and as the count of test cases grew, the maintainability of WATIR code started to become a big problem. A need for framework was felt and since everyone in QA world talks about Keyword Driven framework, we decided to implement the same.

Roadblock:
QA team Google and found thousands of document related to Keyword Framework on internet. All of the documents talk about "WHAT" instead of "HOW" to create Keyword Framework.
QA Team took this up as challenge and decided to build Keyword Framework with minimum strings attached.

The following pages talk about "HOW" to implement Keyword Framework. We hope, this document will help demystify the Keyword Framework and knowledge will be accessible to everyone instead of fortunate few.

Step 1:
Identify and understand the fields available on Excel sheet

Excel sheet is use to separate the code logic and data. Test data and the operations/sequence of the test is planned in external data file.

 Column Name Explanation
•    Keyword : They are special words which would be use to drive the code
•    Object Prop Name : Each object on webpage can be identified by Property Name
•    Object Prop Value : Each object on page layout can be identified by Property Vlaue
•    Expected Output : This column contain the expected result
•    Actual Output : The text step pass or fail
•    Parm_01: Parameter use to enter/select data on webpage
•    Screenshot_Name : Use to store the screenshot name of Actual result

 Step 2:
Following are the high level test steps which would be automated using WATIR
•    Open Browser and navigate to Google
•    Enter "Astadia" in search text box
•    Click on website for Astadia
•    Verify text Astadia on website

 Step 3:
Identify the Keywords to be use. Keywords chosen should be self explanatory as this will help to transition the work of creating testcases to manual testers allowing automation expert to concentrate on writing code.

 Following Keywords were identified

OpenURL  --->  Use to open IE browser and navigate to specific URL
SetText ---> Use to write text to textbox
ClickButton  ---> Use to click on button
ClickLink --->   Use to click on link
Result --->    Use to compare expected and actual result.

 Step 4 :
Write Pseudo Code and then we will convert it into WATIR

Open Excel File
    Loop through each sheet
    For each row in sheet
        Use CASE statement and perform actions depending on Keyword
        End Case
    End For
End Loop
Close Excel File

 Step 5:
Created Excel File as follows

 To get an object property and value, use Firebug (Add on for Firefox) or IE Developer Tool bar.Step 6:
Write code in WATIR and save the file with extension rb

 


#Include The Library
require 'win32ole'
require 'watir'
require 'watir/IE'
require 'D:\AKF\WorkingCode\Utility.rb'
require 'watir/screen_capture'
include Watir
include Watir::ScreenCapture

begin
 
#Open Excel File
excel = WIN32OLE::new('excel.Application')
excel.DisplayAlerts = false
workbook = excel.Workbooks.Open('D:\AKF\WorkingCode\POC.xls')
#Loop through the worksheets
for i in 1 .. workbook.Worksheets.Count

  worksheet = workbook.Worksheets(i)
  rowcount = worksheet.UsedRange.Rows.Count

  for j in 2..rowcount
    Keyword =worksheet.Cells(j, 1).value
    Object_Prop_Name = worksheet.Cells(j, 2).value
    Object_Prop_Value = worksheet.Cells(j, 3).value
    Expected_Output = worksheet.Cells(j, 4).value
    Parm_01 = worksheet.Cells(j, 6).value

    case Keyword
      when /^OpenURL/
      @Browser=IE.start(Parm_01)
      @Browser.maximize
    
      when /^SetText/
      @Browser.text_field(:"#{Object_Prop_Name}", Object_Prop_Value).set(Parm_01)
    
      when/^ClickButton/
      @Browser.button(:"#{Object_Prop_Name}", Object_Prop_Value).click
    
     when/^ClickLink/
    @Browser.link(:"#{Object_Prop_Name}", Object_Prop_Value).click

    when/^CloseURL/
    @Browser.close
    
    when/^Result/
    Actual_Output=verify_text(Expected_Output,"Pass","Fail")
    worksheet.Cells(j, 5)['Value']=Actual_Output
    time_stamp_s = Time.new.strftime('%m%d_%H%M_%S')
    screenshot_filename="#{time_stamp_s}_#{Expected_Output}"+"\.jpg"
    screen_capture(screenshot_filename,active_window_only=false, save_as_bmp=false)
    worksheet.Cells(j, 7)['Value']=screenshot_filename
    workbook.SaveAs('D:\AKF\WorkingCode\POC.xls')
    else
      "Exit"
    end

  end

end
 workbook.Close()
excel.quit()
 
  rescue
  workbook.Close()
  excel.quit()
end

 Step 7:
Following will be output of excel after executing above script.

 Author Biography:
Hirday is currently working as Sr. Manager (QA & CS) in Astadia. He has more than 9 years of IT experience. He is responsible for competency development of the Testing Group in Astadia.